Monday, August 4, 2014

I long admired Rep. Caldwell Butler in my reporting days in Washington, and was sorry when I read of his death last week. I offered a remembrance of Butler's role to a newspaper I had not written for in decades, and Roanoke Times Editorial Page Editor Dwayne Yancey put this on his pages this morning:

The death of former U.S. Rep. Caldwell Butler of Roanoke July 28 was
more than a sad moment in Virginia politics; it was a reminder that the
model of the elected politician who chooses to do the right thing rather
than bow to pressure of party or electorate has virtually disappeared
from American politics. Don’t get me wrong: Caldwell Butler could be a
fiery proponent of his Republican Party’s conservative mainstream,
fighting against an entrenched state Democratic machine that controlled
Virginia politics early in his career and bringing about the vibrant
two-party political system that gives Old Dominion voters real choices
in today’s highly-charged atmosphere.

Where Butler stood out was
in the depth of his integrity – everything from his careful parsing of
legislation to make sure it did what it purported to do, to his
determination to ignore potential for personal political damage on
questions of governmental ethics. Many regarded the owlish, bookish
Butler as a modern-day Founding Father, as concerned about principle and
fairness as about policy. He became a central figure in the House
Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry. He at first
regarded the committee as overloaded with “crazies” and maintained a
stout defense of the president who helped him win election – right up
until he concluded President Nixon had committed at least two
impeachable offenses.

Butler’s remarkable speech about his vote,
delivered 40 years ago on July 25 and reprinted on these pages in recent
days, was the most riveting and memorable drawing of the line in the
sands of politics I can recall while working in the Roanoke Times and
World News’ Washington Bureau in the early 1970s and covering Virginia
and N.C. politics for going on 40 years. He was one of several
Republicans on the committee – an “unholy alliance,” as they put it –
whose influential votes not only helped move the committee to adopt
articles of impeachment, but sent a clear message to the American public
that this was a bipartisan indictment of impermissible presidential
conduct.

Butler might well have played an even more visible role
in the continuing impeachment process had President Nixon not resigned
on August 9, 1974, after the release of tape recordings showing the
president was deeply involved in a cover-up. His resignation came before
the full House was to vote to formally adopt articles of impeachment
and send them to the Senate for a trial whether to remove President
Nixon. For weeks, Butler had quietly been discussing, on an entirely off
the record basis, his views on the impeachment process with my
colleague in the Washington Bureau, Wayne Woodlief, for a book that
might appear after the process ended. Butler was thought to be the
perfect lawmaker to serve as one of the House “managers” of the
impeachment trial in the Senate, where House members would act as
prosecutors and make the case for the president’s removal. The Roanoke
Republican would have been a formidable opponent for the president’s
dwindling number of supporters in the Senate, and it would have given
him a world-wide platform to demonstrate his legal and oratorical
skills. I have no doubt Butler would have ignored the opportunity for
dazzling publicity and concentrated instead on doing what he regarded as
an unpleasant but necessary job. President Nixon’s resignation
short-circuited that book.

That summer of 1974 was fraught with
strain and turmoil for members of both parties struggling to resolve a
great constitutional quandary. Butler’s wife, June (who died June 28),
read to him from Woodward and Bernstein’s book, “All the President’s
Men” at bedtime, but the calls and letters from Nixon’s supporters kept
rolling in. Late in the proceedings I spoke with Butler and wrote about
how he was handling the pressure. The phone rang at my Arlington home
the night before the story was to run. An editor had a question that
went something like this; “Jack, in your story you say that Caldwell
Butler keeps an $80,000 concubine down at Southern Pines. Didn’t you
mean ‘condominium’ instead of ‘concubine’?” Knowing that Butler liked a
good story, I confessed the almost-error to him the following week when
he got back to Washington. Butler quipped something like, “I’m sorry
they caught that. It would have done wonders for my reputation.”

Even in duress, Butler knew when to laugh at himself. Then he went back to work.

About Me

Jack Betts is a journalist who moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia after nearly 40 years in journalism in North Carolina and Virginia. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he was a Pentagon photographer while in the Army, Washington correspondent for daily newspapers in Norfolk, Roanoke and Greensboro during the Watergate Era, Raleigh Bureau Chief of the Greensboro Daily News, editor of North Carolina Insight magazine, N.C. Public Television panelist and associate editor of The Charlotte Observer. He won six 1st place prizes in the N.C. Press Association's annual editorial competitions, and was inducted in 2006 into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame. He and his wife Martha B. and their dog Sadie live on an old farm near Meadows of Dan, VA. From May through October he plays bass in the Jim Marshall and Friends Jam on Friday afternoons at the Blue Ridge Music Center near milepost 213 just south of Galax, VA.